Hilda Hilst

Hilda Hilst (April 21, 1930 – February 4, 2004) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, and playwright. She is lauded as one of the most important Portuguese-language authors of the twentieth century. Her work touches on the themes of mysticism, insanity, the body, eroticism, and female sexual liberation. Hilst greatly revered the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and the influence of their styles—like stream of consciousness and fractured reality—is evident in her own work. Hilda de Almeida Prado Hilst was the only daughter of Apolônio de Almeida Prado Hilst and Bedecilda Vaz Cardoso. Her father owned a coffee plantation and also worked as a journalist, poet, and essayist. He struggled with Schizophrenia throughout his life. Her mother came from a conservative Portuguese immigrant family. Her parents' conditions, their suffering with mental health, and oppressive conservative social standards greatly influenced Hilst's writing. Her parents separated in 1932 while she was still an infant, and it was only three years later when her father received the diagnosis of schizophrenia and thereafter spent much of his life in mental institutions. Her mother was also institutionalized at the end of her life for dementia. Hilst grew up in Jaú, a town in the state of São Paulo, with her mother and half brother from her mother's previous marriage. Hilst attended elementary and high school at Collegia Santa Marcelina in São Paulo before enrolling in a bachelor's degree program at Mackenzie Presbyterian University. Before starting college, Hilst's mother told her of her father's condition, and Hilst went to visit him for the first time in a mental institution. Her visits with her father gave her unusual exposure to the severe cases of mental illness patients there suffered, which would come to impact Hilst's treatment of the mind and surrealism in her writing. After graduating from Mackenzie, Hilst began studying for her second degree at the law school at the University of São Paulo.